A friend of mine runs a business loaning money to businesses. Every once in a while, he asks me to baby-sit a file for him or to help him interview a potential borrower (I don’t loan the money, my job is to vet the candidates who needs loans if he is really busy and I have some free time- yes, I need a life but, in my defense, it is a good way to learn about businesses). If you sit through enough loan interviews and hear enough stories of why a business needs a loan, you begin to pick out a discernible pattern between the desirable borrowers, the undesirable and the “not on your life” borrowers. With lenders increasingly tightening loan criteria, to the extent that the student loan market has nearly collapsed in the United States, what are some things to avoid if you are looking for a loan of any kind beyond the obvious factors such as bad credit score, no documentation etc.?

• “I would like you to loan me a lot of money based on the fact I am nice/the business idea is great but I will put no money in it myself.” Lending is the management of leveraged risk (remember that lenders have lenders too so they are leveraging themselves). The best way to mitigate lending risk is to make sure the borrower shares in the risk by putting in their own money (aka “skin in the game”). If you put no skin in the game, you are telling the lender you have no confidence in yourself or the business (put your money where your mouth is). Even a token contribution from a borrower with little assets goes a long way to showing a lender you are willing to share the risk. One of the few situations I know of where the borrower doesn’t have to put any meaningful skin in the game is the 40 year mortgage and these are walking car-crashes for lender and borrower alike.
• “Sorry, you have the wrong lender…” Make sure you target the appropriate lender. This sounds patently obvious but not all lenders are built equally. The quick and dirty on loan sources are:

• Credit Unions: Good for personal and small business loans; not the best source for larger commercial loans
• Banks: They like loans where there is a lot of collateral. For example, historically, mortgages or commercial real estate and RSP loans. Like unsecured lines of credit and credit cards. Hate student loans, small commercial loans (unless backed by the government). Each bank also has their specialty.
• Private lenders: Typically, higher risk borrowers with sufficient collateral (a 2nd mortgage on an appreciating home or rental property).
• Angel investors/venture capitalist: High flying businesses which have the chance of going public.

• Bad Attitude. Lenders are people too. You may look great on paper but if you have a bad attitude, there is a disincentive to lend money to you. If you are difficult to work with now, and the money hasn’t been even loaned, what happens if you fall behind on payments? I know lenders who may have rejected a borrower but because they had a good attitude, actively helped them find another lender.
• Unreliability. Your parents were right. If you keep moving jobs, cities and spouses (!?!), you look like a flight risk and less likely to get a loan (not to mention all the neighborhood gossip your parents have to deal with arising from your fickle ways).
• “I need cash quick” Total red light for a lender. Why do you need cash so quickly- who or what are you running from?

Good luck with obtaining a loan.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the way to get out of a crisis is not to employ the same thinking that got you into the mess.  Lawyers tend to be a sully lot because they help clients get out of messes, whether self-inflicted or not, so they spend their days in crisis management and problem solving; it may not look like it, spouting random latin phrases in our conversations, but lawyers are (supposed) to use the law to help their clients get out of messes. That is really our job description.

Are you in a mess (financial or otherwise)? I never thought about it until I wrote this blog but there is a very easy to replicate set of steps to get out of a mess:

1.  Ask someone if you are actually in a mess. This sounds very simple but are you actually in a mess. Being in debt $15,000 where the carrying costs are low and you are making $60,000/year is relatively “unmessy” compared to being in debt for $150,000 where the carrying costs are high and you are making $100,000/year (I would argue that you aren’t really in a mess in the former situation). Since we only know our own experiences, it is always helpful to ask someone you trust whether, relatively speaking, you are in a small, medium or large hole.  You could be panicking over nothing or willfully blind to imminent danger but unless you quantify the issue contextually, you’ll never know. In other words, don’t wait until the barbarians are at the gate to assess your situation. Depending on situation, a good financial planner, money coach, accountant or lawyer can help you wrap your mind around whether you are actually in a mess. That is why you have free consultations with professional advisors- sometimes you think you are in a mess and an advisor may tell you that you have over-blown the issue.
2. If you are in a mess, how big is it? Can this be fixed in months, weeks or years? For example, if you owe a lot of people money, how long would it take you to repay it and would the repayment impair your ability to live a normal life?  Notice I didn’t write can your mess be fixed in days. There is no silver bullet in life- no one waves a magic wand and the mess goes away. It takes some time to extract yourself out of a mess. Since a certain type of thinking got you into a mess consult with someone who thinks and acts differently than you to help you figure out the size of the issue.
3. What are your options given the size of the mess? There are always options. Get another job. Dump him. Ask your parents for help. There’s no such thing as a hopeless situation. Even in personal finance, there is always bankruptcy. Sit down and map out all your options. If you don’t know what your options are, get help and a second set of eyes to help you. Being in a mess is no time to be vain and not ask for help. In fact, I have often found people who are humble, willing to make changes and open to suggestion get a lot of help from strangers.
4. Weigh your options, pick one and don’t look back. The primary reason why people can’t dig themselves out of messes is that they change strategies mid-stream, have bad/negative thoughts and attitudes and they don’t work hard to get out of a mess. I thought the best definition of good leadership I read lately was a good leaders listen, weighs all of their options and then pursues a course of action decisively.
5. Track your way out of a mess. Track, track, track. A pillar of good goal setting which also applies to getting out of the mess. How are you doing? Make sure that the intervals that you use to track your progress are sufficiently wide to show progress. Tracking progress in days and weeks may not be too helpful since progress in the beginning can be slow and can discourage you.

Above all, stay positive throughout. Good luck.

EnCana is one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world which, at oil and gas prices being what they are, also makes it one of the largest companies in the world (Forbes Magazine ranks it as one of the 200 best companies in the world). On Sunday, EnCana announced it would split itself into two different companies. For lack of a better term, EnCana Gasco (which will hold all its natural gas properties and assets) and EnCana IntegratedOilco (which will hold all of its oil properties and assets including those in the Alberta oilsands). The market reacted favorably to the move, sending EnCana stock up more than 8% in a day (this is not a recommendation to buy). EnCana is not the first company to split itself up into parts: Altria spun out Philip Morris recently and Canadian Pacific Limited spun itself out into 5 subsidiaries in 2001. Why do companies do this and is this good for the investor?

1. Wall Street is much stupider than you think.  The financial industry loves simplicity. Most analysts have never run a business before. Many take their newly minted MBA to a big investment bank so they don’t understand the day to day of running a business. They only look at numbers and businesses with lots of different operations confuse them. EnCana confused analysts because they had natural gas production and oil production and, despite the fact they are both energy plays, it left the street confused (insert your own observations here). Thus, EnCana splitting itself into two companies that concentrate on one thing only feeds the street’s need for simplicity.  For the investor, this is good too because you invest in businesses which is easy to comprehend and simple to understand businesses send stock prices soaring. On the other hand, complicated businesses suffer from the dreaded “conglomerate discount” where the analysts get confused and throw their hands up in the air and punish the stock (see General Electric as a prime example or even Citibank pre-subprime where critics complained that it had become too unwieldy of a financial services empire and difficult to understand- well, they solved that problem didn’t they?).
2. The upside of the company just doubled. Every shareholder of EnCana currently will receive one share each in each company and the current dividend will be split such that the shareholder is going to receive the same amount of dividend but now paid by two entities. Thus, the investor has twice the opportunity for the stock price to go up. For the companies and investment community, any company that gets split up into smaller parts makes it easier for it to be taken over (think of a cake; it is easier to eat two medium sized slices than one big one. Same logic applies to a company a competitor wants to buy) which equals $$$ for advisors in a take-over situation and a greater return for the investor of the company being acquired.
3. You can always make a quick buck. Companies that split themselves up only do so after lobbying from the investment industry (see above for the reasons why). When they do listen to the investment industry, the stock typically shoots up quite quickly (although not always the case) so it presents an opportunity for a shareholder to cash out quickly once the company announces it is splitting up.

Companies that split themselves up do not always present a winning situation for investors but, because of magnitude of the move, most companies only undertake this if they know the outcome will be generally positive for all. However, there are always exceptions to the rules: some companies split up after a disastrous merger (for years, shareholders have demanded that AOL Time Warner break itself up after one of the worse corporate mergers in history). But, even in these circumstances, the stock tends to head up after the announcement (although the gain is relative considering the stock price probably crashed).

As an observation about the cyclical nature of business (or the fickleness of the business community), EnCana is actually the product of a merger as recent as 2002. One of the primary reasons for the merger was to satisfy the investment communities’ desire to create an energy company sufficiently big to be competitive globally- and now its too big for the same community to comprehend. Go figure. Same thing happened to AT & T: it is almost back together from its Ma Bell days (although they were forced to break themselves up).  Having a lot of degrees does not guarantee you’ll be just as indecisive as the rest of us.

I ended up having some drinks with a friend of mine who has moved from the bank to an investment counsel firm. An investment counsel, in plain English, manages money for rich people (their legal standard of care is higher than an investment advisor and, with such higher exposure to liability, they charge higher fees; hence, their fee structure tends to cater only to well-off individuals). Before we had too much to drink and started waxing nostalgia about a more innocent time, we somehow started talking about mutual funds. His firm does not sell mutual funds: the first reason being is that rich people don’t want to be offered the same product as the mere plebeians like you and me (yeah, it is snobbish but its how the world works however unfair) and second reason is that the mutual fund model is simply broken.

It is always interesting to hear the view of insiders about certain investment products and his criticism of mutual funds serves as a reminder why we should not buy mutual funds and why the investment industry has recognized the model is broken and trying to sell new product instead (I have often thought that the ABCP fiasco became a larger problem than it should have because people became frustrated with mutual fund performance and were pressing their advisors for something different).  For the record, I started selling my mutual funds earlier this year and moving into ETF’s.

In no particular order, here’s what is wrong with mutual funds:

1. Most mutual fund managers are employees and not owners and have no incentive to beat their peers. Most mutual fund managers at large mutual fund companies are employee, albeit well-compensated employees. Think of your work-place; if you are an employee, you put in a professional effort but, as long as you collect your pay cheque, you are pretty much ok. Think of the owner of the business; they do well if their business does well. Thus, they have an extra incentive to go the extra mile. Financial Jungle did point out that mutual fund managers who are also owners of their fund tend to out-perform the market but this class of mutual funds is few and far between. Most mutual funds  are managed by employees which tends to mean they make safe choices and try not to rock the boat to keep their job (as the saying goes, no one ever got fired hiring IBM).
2. Most mutual funds are basically closet index funds. My friend point this out. The larger the mutual fund, the more likely they are buying stocks which consist large indexes like the S&P Industrials, the TSX 60 or the MCSI.  Why do you need to pay fees for someone to do this for you. An exchange traded fund (ETF) will do the same thing. But here’s the kicker as astutely pointed out by my friend: most mutual funds have to keep approximately 5-10% of their assets in cash to pay out redemptions so it is a closet index fund but not using 100 cents on your dollar.  A mutual fund could only be using 90 cents of your dollar to invest in a de facto index. That’s a lot of wastage for doing what you can do easily buying a ETF. 
3. The prime business of your mutual fund is not to manage your money but to sell more mutual funds. Eric Sprott is a bit of a local legend. His mutual funds do not hold any bank stocks or traditional blue chip stocks. Instead, he invests based on large macro-economic trends. His most recent successes being an early bet on gold and more recently on food. In a recent feature on Sprott’s management company, the article made an observation that Sprott Asset Management employs a lot of analysts (who research and make recommendations on stock to buy for a mutual fund) rather than on sales staff which apparently is opposite of the mutual fund industry. I scratched my head over this observation- you mean to tell me that the mutual fund industry is top-heavy on sales people rather than financial analysts? The obvious implication being the mutual fund is using our funds to sell more mutual funds rather than manage our money.
4. The fees are a killer. This dis-advantage to a mutual fund has been beaten into the ground: mutual funds charge high fees compared to performance, fees are paid if the mutual fund performs well or poorly etc. etc. But here’s some more food for thought- why are fees consistent no matter how much you invest? For example, why does a mutual fund charge 2% MER even if you invest, $500, $5,000 or $50,000 into a fund? Isn’t there an economy of scale if you invest $50,000 that should be reflected in lower fees? The conclusion being you are worse off the more money you invest in a mutual fund since you do not have any economies of scale (whereas in a stock purchase the commission is the same no matter how many stocks you buy).
5. You are not being sold the best mutual fund but the fund paying the best commission structure to the investment advisor or with the largest marketing budget. This is pretty self-explanatory.

If the rich don’t buy mutual funds, why should you?

I am on rather extensive business travel this week. It is one of those weeks where I have to remind myself where I am when I wake up in the morning (and, unfortunately, I am asking the question in a context different than the college days). Thus, this is the last post of the week. As you may know, I write a monthly column for Geezeo: a free online management software and budgeting tool. This month, I answered the question of what happens when financial goals are impacted by an economic downturn. Hope you enjoy the article.

Back to regular programming next week. Have a good weekend.

People hate lawyers for a billion reasons. Lawyers charge too much. Lawyers aren’t human. Lawyers don’t speak English. Lawyers only care about themselves and on and on it goes. But I have always suspected the real reason why people hate lawyers is that they related seeing a lawyer with bad times. Most people equate seeing a lawyer with being sued, drafting a will/executing on the contents of a will, reviewing their severance package etc. Other than the purchase of a home (where you really don’t see the lawyer that much), lawyers are not people you see for the happy things in your life.

I find that the reverse logic applies with investment advisors and financial planners. Everyone wants to see them when the markets are up. Buy this. Sell that. Long this stock and throw me some funky financial products please. But what happens during bad times? I find that, in my circle of contacts anyways, there’s a distinct chill that occurs. People don’t want to call their investment advisors about anything other than to get them to put everything in cash. This seems strange to me. In good times, a trained monkey could probably pick enough stocks to make money but, in bad times, shouldn’t the trained and paid professionals navigate you through down markets to minimize damage?

I know there’s a lot of skepticism about the effectiveness of investment advisors and planners; some justified and some not. However, I am known for my catch phrases and one of them that applies in life should also apply for personal finance: don’t judge people when things are going right, judge them when things go wrong.

If you have a good investment advisor or planner, now is the time they will shine. If you have a bad advisor, you’ll really see how bad they are now they have to really work for their money and it will confirm your feeling that it is time to move on. Let me give you an example I have alluded to in the past. My parent’s current investment advisor was appointed by their financial institution after the unfortunate death of their previous advisor. The new advisor simply stinks. He kept trying to get my parents to sell stock when the market panicked earlier this year. I believe he must have skipped class the day they taught “buy low, sell high” but took extra notes on the class about how advisors are compensated. My parents obviously thought he was from Mars and didn’t follow his “advice” (I use the term loosely). Now to find them another advisor…

The point being engage your investment advisor in a meaningful dialogue in difficult times. You’ll know what you have on your hands. The good advisors earn their keep in difficult times while the meek crumble.

When you get to a certain age, doctors recommend that you starting seeing them for an annual physical to assess your personal health. This is a very good suggestion but when was the last time you did a check-up on your personal finances? I am not talking about an annual visit with your investment advisor or your accountant to look at your portfolio or file your taxes but a true contextual look at your financial life. Doctors run a typical battery of tests at a physical: blood pressure, resting heart beat, blood tests etc. Here’s my equivalent of an annual physical on your personal finances. The key is to do it all at once so you can formulate a plan to make the appropriate adjustments if you are not financially healthy.

1. Check your credit score. You do this for a couple of reasons: (i) to check the accuracy of your creditors reporting on you; (ii) to assess if there are any mistakes (very possible if you have a common name); and (iii) to determine if you have been a victim of identity theft (i.e. is there a credit card account open that you didn’t authorize?). Credit reports are free by law. Obtaining your credit score in Canada or obtaining a credit score in the United States is simple and easy. As a side-note, you should never directly or indirectly pay for your own credit score. A lot of privacy products now sell your credit score as an added bonus to their privacy protection products. You can obtain your credit score for free by doing it yourself. The “added bonus” feature is not a bonus at all; they are relying on you being lazy to move product.
2. Track your budget or find out how much your fixed expenses are. The problem with budgets is that few people follow them. They are like new year’s resolutions. They are made and then forgotten about weeks later. Check how you are doing against your budget. If you are like me and hate budgeting then do what I do. I track what my fixed expenses are; I define fixed expenses as expenses you have to pay every month regardless of your circumstances which you need to survive. Thus, we are looking at items like rent/mortgage, car and life insurance, property taxes, day-care expenses, bank fees etc. If your fixed expenses are creeping up, find out why. It could be for perfectly legitimate reasons like you had another kid or not so legitimate reasons such as defining non-essential items as fixed expenses (your going out budget is not a fixed expenses; worse case scenario, you are broke, you stay home and watch t.v. or borrow a book from the library but seeing Iron Man is not a need in life).
3. Check how much cash or credit sources you have available. The key question being do you have enough cash or credit to get you through bad times? The only way to do this is to look at your fixed expenses. Ideally, you take your fixed expenses and multiply by 3. If you have this amount of cash or credit available, then you should be fine since you have 3 months of expenses covered in a worse-case scenario.
4. How is your portfolio doing? I am shocked when people don’t know approximately how much money they made or lost in their portfolio. You don’t have to be like us bloggers and know your net worth to the nanosecond. Pick a date every year, look at your portfolio from the same date last year and figure out how much you made. Can’t tell because you made contributions? Most institutions now do the math for you so request it (this also gives you an excuse to call your investment advisor and ask questions about what they did for you the previous year).
5. How is your asset allocation? Asset allocation refers what you hold in your portfolio whether it is cash, bonds or stock. Asset allocation is a whole discussion in and of itself but keep this fact in mind: studies show that 85% of your portfolio’s return is determined by asset mix (see Kirzner and Croft, Protecting Your Nest Egg). Middle Class Millionaire previously wrote a very concise summary on asset allocation. Again, if you have an investment advisor, this is the perfect time to call them up and have a discussion on where your portfolio is going.
6. Are you paying too much tax? The blogging world has a mantra that if you get a tax refund, you paid too much tax since a tax refund is really an interest-free loan to the government. I agree and disagree with this viewpoint (I didn’t have time to address this topic this year) but the larger question to me is do your tax returns show you are consistently receiving a refund of approximately the same amount? If you are, you would make better use of your time not complaining about the inherit unfairness of the tax system but doing sometime about your own situation (again, don’t file your taxes and put them away- look at them carefully and compare it against previous years). If you are receiving a refund year over year in the same amount, adjust your with-holding tax. Go to HR and tell them you want to with-hold less tax in the amount of your refund (for a more detailed how to in Canada, see comment 6 in Canadian Capitalist’s post about taxes refunds).
7. Update your resume. I am not sure I have to elaborate on this point but the more we do the less details we remember so update your resume even if you are not looking for a job. A resume is like a line of credit; have it ready before you need it.
8. Review how much passive income you are making annually. Tina Fey’s character in 30 Rock once said something funny to her boss (who, I gather, is super rich in the show) which sticks in my head even though I don’t watch the show- to paraphrase: “I need you to show me that thing that rich people do where they take money and make more money with it…” That’s how passive income is produced in a nut-shell. The more you have, the less you have to worry so start tracking how much interest, dividend, rental and other income you are making and then figure out ways to make money off your money.
9. Is it time to find new advisors? I have a post on this topic this week but too many people stick with advisors they don’t like/are not good fits because when they need an advisor, they don’t have any time to look for new ones. Take time to figure out whether your advisors are doing what they are supposed to well before you need to call them.
10. Are you getting where you want to go in life? If not, why not? The often quoted definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Are you getting closer to your goals? If not, what changes can you make to help you along because if you are going side-ways or backwards clearly what you are doing is not working.

I picked July 1 as my check-up date because my taxes are filed, half the year is over (meaning there’s enough time in the rest of year to make adjustments) and things begin to slow down come summer.

Did I miss anything in the check-up? If so, please share. Thanks.

Just an odds and ends Friday, where I clean out various items across my blogging desk:

1. As pointed out by one of the commentators, question 7 in yesterday’s Debt Management and Savings Test, asked about the size of retirement contributions which did not consider that those in their 20’s and 30’s may not have worked long enough to be eligible to contribute $50,000 to their retirement portfolio. Thus, in lieu of that question, give yourself one point if contribute 6.8% or more of your gross salary to your retirement portfolio annually (the 6.8% figure is from a 2001 study from the Employment Benefits Research Institute and the Investment Company Institute). I’ll try to come up with some new tests and quizzes in the future.
2. I am becoming a carnival junkie. This week I was privileged to be the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted by Lazy Man and Money. Thanks for hosting Lazy Man (although if you did work to host, are you really that lazy?)
3. I mentioned as a side-comment in a previous post that revealing your salary at work causes more problems than solves them. This article writes on this issue and how the Facebook generation has no issue revealing their salaries publicly. The comments are amusing since, after the writer talks about all the trouble caused about revealing salaries, various commentators post their salary (or at least their salary range).
4. Michael James on Money ran an informal poll on what interest rates people are paying on unsecured line of credits. How do you compare?
5. Dividends4life muses about questions you should ask before you invest in anything.

Have a good weekend. On business travel next week, expect a lighter than usual posting schedule.

Yep, I am giving all of you, dear readers, a quiz on your debt management and savings practices. The rules are easy; There’s 10 questions. For every question, you give yourself one point if you answer it “right.” A 10 is a perfect score. Some of the questions are based on conventional standards of debt management and savings and others are just personal rules for me. Here we go…

1. DEBT MANAGEMENT. When you apply for a loan, a financial institution looks at your debt-to-income ratio (in other words, how much of your gross income you use to pay debt). The first ratio is known as the front ratio and measures the cost of carrying a home (mortgage payment, home insurance, municipal taxes, mortgage insurance premiums and condo fees if applicable) as a percentage of your gross income. To calculate your front ratio, add up the cost of carrying shelter and divide by your gross income monthly. For example, if your shelter costs are $1,500 and your gross income monthly is $4,000, your front ratio is 37.5%. If your front ratio is 31 or less (the recommended ratio according to the Federal Housing Administration in the U.S.), score one point (good luck Vancouver-ites!).
2. DEBT MANAGEMENT.The second part of the debt-to-income rati0, the back ratio, measures your total debt load (the front ratio plus credit card payments, car loans, student loans, LOC payments etc) over your gross income. Using the above example, if your housing costs are $1, 500 and all other debt is an additional $500, your back ratio is 50% ($1500+$500/$4,000). If your back ratio is 43 or less (i.e. you spend 43% or less of your gross income on debt), score one point.
3. MORTGAGES. The Millionaire Next Door (one of my favorite personal finance books) recommends that to achieve financial success never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice of your household’s realized annual income. In other words, if your household income is $75,000, never carry more than a $150,000 mortgage. Score one point if your mortgage is 2 times or less of your household income.
4. AUTO EXPENSE. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2005 that all households spent on average $8,344 in automobile expenses (gas, car loan, insurance, repairs, fuzzy dice etc.); that’s a lot of money on a depreciating asset. Score one point if you spent less than that (you may have to ball-park this).
5. CREDIT CARDS. The median (not average) amount of credit card debt in the U.S.A. is estimated to be $1,900. Score one point if you have credit card debt of less than $1,900.
6. CREDIT CARD BALANCE. A debt ratio on your credit card means how much of your credit limit has been used. For example, if you have a credit card limit of $5,000 and you use $3,000 of it, your debt ratio is 60%. A debt ratio of over 50% lowers your credit score. Score one point if your debt ratio on your credit card is less than 50%.
7. RETIREMENT CONTRIBUTION. In 2005, the CA Magazine (a magazine for accountants) estimated the average retirement portfolio was $50,000. Score one point if your retirement portfolio is over $50,000 (if you have a pension, lucky you, and score a point since the average pension for public sector worker is worth $500,000).
8. SAVINGS RATE. Score one point if you save 10% or more of after-tax income (and kudos to you if you make it automatic). For reference, most experts agree that a 15% savings rate makes you comfortable and anything over 20% savings will, over time, give you financial independence.
9. MINIMIZING TAXES. According to the Millionaire Next Door, the average American pays 11.6% of their net worth annually in income tax. In other words, if your net worth is $200,000, you are paying $23,200 annually in taxes. The best way to reduce this ratio is to put your money in appreciating assets and hold onto them (since you are only taxed upon sale), tax-free instruments (i.e. municipal bonds) or invest in assets that produce tax-friendly distributions (i.e. dividends). Score one point if you pay less than 11.6% of your net worth in taxes annually.
10. CASH ON HAND. Score one point if you have cash on hand or unused line of credit equal to three months of fixed expenses.

Add up your score, if you scored…

0-2: Nowhere to go but up. Tackle things one step at a time. Most of all, stay positive.

3-5: Need work but you have a foundation to work on.

6-8: Great work, you are well on the way to financial success

9-10: what are you doing reading this blog? Don’t you have your own island to tend to?

I scored an 8. How did you do?